Leaders, Rules, and Personalist Politics

Leaders, Rules, and Personalist Politics addresses the common view that many personalist leaders, often called dictators, concentrate decision-making power in their own person and usually act in an arbitrary and unconstrained fashion. It argues that, rather than being unstructured in this way, authoritarian leaderships are actually structured by a set of rules that the oligarchs who run such systems generally follow. The book outlines those rules and then shows how they have applied across the life of one authoritarian system, the Soviet Union. The core of this analysis is the relationship between the individual leader, his colleagues and the rules, with decision-making and how it is structured central to this. The book explains the emergence of these rules under the predominant leadership of Lenin and how the patterns of action that they shaped changed once he disappeared from the scene. The emergence of Stalin as a dominant leader, especially with the unrolling of the terror in the mid-late 1930s, may have seemed to call into question the idea that rules could continue to operate to structure the activity of the top leadership, but the book explains how even under a dominant leader those rules continued to operate, albeit some of them in an altered form. The return to predominant leaders after Stalin’s death (Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev) saw a further re-working of the rules. Their ability to accommodate change while continuing to provide a framework for the actions of the leaders shows the flexibility of the rules, although the limits to this flexibility were shown by the collapse of the system in 1991. This longitudinal survey of the rules and how they developed underlines the important role they played in the longevity of the authoritarian Soviet system.

Graeme Gill, Professor Emeritus, University of Sydney

Graeme Gill is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney. His main focus of scholarly interest has been the politics of the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, although he has also published comparative studies on revolution, authoritarian leadership, class and democracy, democratisation, and the development of the state. He has published extensively and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. He is also a former president of the International Council for Central and East European Studies.